Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly

Pretty cool. Looks somewhat similar to Dash (https://kapeli.com/dash)

Alas, the state of the tech advertising industry…

Honestly, it’s all so exhausting I’m just so damn tired. You can’t even buy an OS anymore that isn’t loaded to the brim with bloat and spyware—provided BY THE MANUFACTURER nonetheless.

Honestly, once Windows ten is end Of life I’m done with tech industry.

I’ll go to the library and read some books; I’ll use a pen/pencil; I’ll wander, blissfully into the sunset.

Here's a cook UX project [0] that shows a potential UI-free operating system like you described.

[0] https://uxdesign.cc/introducing-mercury-os-f4de45a04289

These kinds of niche browsers come up so often, and I love the idea, but I'm constantly thrown off by both the lack of extension support and the lack of other privacy guarantees that come through Firefox. I can't, for example, turn off webGL on this browser, or use Firefox's anti-fingerprinting features. And of course uBlock.

What I'm starting to realize is that the answer to this probably isn't just to try and add extension support to Electron or to get every project to reimplement webExtensions. Reimplementations are likely to have errors anyway. I'm slowly starting to realize that this is likely the wrong way to solve the extension problem.

Instead what I think is needed here is some kind of shared base for handling network connections, extensions, privacy, and adblocking. Honestly, it doesn't necessarily even need to be a graphical browser, these projects don't have a problem rendering content or embedding a V8 engine. What they need is some kind shared, trusted utility that they can all use to hook into that would almost act like a MITM between the page and them.

I look at stuff like Servo/Stylo, and that's obviously exciting, but the hard part here doesn't seem to be rendering CSS/HTML, laying out pages, and executing Javascript. The hard part is switching browsers without feeling like you're giving up a lot of security/privacy work in the process, and maybe there's some way for a shared framework to do that without worrying about the rendering part at all? I would love to try out a browser like Bonsai while keeping most of my existing Firefox settings in regards to privacy, site isolation, adblocking, etc... Whether that would be some kind of proxy that sat between browsers and the Internet, or whether it was something that browsers could be built on? I don't know, I'm sure there are complications I haven't thought of.

Am I off base with this? There's so much talk about how browsers are wildly complicated and that makes it hard to build new ones. But the showstoppers for me with indie browsers rarely have anything at all to do with web compatibility or what engine they're using. That's not really the part that I feel like is missing. I almost wonder if it would be possible to hook something up to headless Firefox as a middleperson so that Firefox could at least do some work with forcing DoS, running pages through uBlock Origin, quarantining storage, etc...

Matrix has sort of tried to work in this direction with some of their clients. Stuff like E2E encryption isn't recommended to build yourself -- Matrix tries to provide a service you can link with whatever your custom client is that just handles E2E for you -- that way when you use a custom client, it's less likely that they've accidentally encrypted all of your messages incorrectly.

I find the pitch true to the extent that it says "helps" and I think that much is true. How much is helps and whether it helps more than any other random tool is another matter. There's another comment that says something more general like a window manager or DE that allows any content to be overlaid like this would be better. I think I agree with that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28447659